It is odd to say with triumph that I was even more confused than I thought.
But I just looked again at a post I sent two days ago in which I was trying to make the point that William was failing to convey what was on his mind as he used the word 'rules' and claimed there was no need to describe his notion behind that ambiguous word. I was arguing that, as a writer, he was shirking his responsibility to make himself as clear as he could. As an example I quoted William's line: [We can still communicate with signs we create; in this case "rules".] To which I responded with this: [Believe this: I have no clear idea what "he is saying" here. The line appears to assert that "rules" are "signs". I can't follow that at all -- in part because I'm not sure how much William's notion of "signs" coincides with Frances's recent description of her notion of "signs". But also because at least some signs don't begin to feel like "rules" to me. If I see a billboard sign that says, 'Clausthaler is the world's best non-alcoholic beer,' that doesn't feel like a rule to me. [Again I think I should stress this: I am not playing games here, I'm not pretending. I honestly don't know what the heck William has in mind.] It did not occur to me then, but with mild astonishment it occurred to me this morning that when William wrote ["rules"] his intention was probably to cite the scription 'rules' as a sample of a "sign". I read his line not as MENTIONING the word, but as USING it. I'll rephrase it to try to convey how I was reading it: [We can still communicate with signs we create; and in this case the signs are rules.] But I now conjecture that William's intent may have been: [We can still communicate with signs we create; in this case one of those signs is the particular word 'rules'.] Van Quine was vexed by the typographical confusion that can arise when we use double-quotes to signal we are quoting a line but within the original quoted line there are already uses of double-quotes. Linguisticians in such cases tend to convert the internal double-quotes to single quotes. But Quine wanted to save single quotes for mentioning a word, not using it, and also save double-quotes for other functions like citing a renegade use of a word Thus if he were quoting the entire following sentence, he'd do it this way: ['Boston' has six letters, and Boston has 700,000 people, among whom are a number of women in "Boston" marriages.] So Quine developed a system for using various sorts of brackets to avoid confusion -- but it never caught on because it was too confusing. I've used plain brackets in this posting in place of double-quotes in certain places. The use of single quotes to signal mentioning a word rather than using it has always seemed to me a good thing. The lack of a complete bracket system like Quine's leads all of us into a confusing array of functions for double-quotes. I have not succeeded in persuading William that his persistent use of the single, undefined, word 'rules' results in ambiguity. When I've said the ambiguity could be reduced by his describing what he has in mind with the word, William repeatedly misconstrues this as my saying the reader has no responsibility whatever to work toward communication. When I was young, I worked hard at "understanding" John Dewey, but I always finally quit with exasperation and guilt. Recently I tried reading him again. I find his writing remains "difficult", but I now see the difficulty stems from Dewey the writer: He produced cataracts of undefined, ambiguous, abstraction-words. His inability to see why this was a constant barrier to "communication" seems remarkably dense to me. It seems acutely apt that Dewey in fact suffered from an affliction from birth: He was tone deaf.
